Authors: Robert Kroese
“
I’ll hitch a ride with someone.”
“
And then what? If the FBI isn’t already looking for you, they will be soon. You think you can escape the feds on foot, with twenty dollars and a handful of black licorice? I’m not leaving you, Paul. We’re in this together.”
“
You don’t have to do that, Tali.”
“
Yes, I do,” she says. “Wait, no, you’re right. I don’t have to. But I’m going to.”
“
Why? You’ll go to prison if they catch us.”
“
They’re not going to catch us.”
The fuck they aren’t.
“If you say so.”
“
I do,” she says. “I’m going to get you out of this. I promise.”
Yeah, I think. You
’re going to save me, just like you saved your sister. But I don’t have the energy to fight her. “All right,” I say. “Hey, they can track my cell phone even when I’m not using it, right?”
“
I think so,” she says. “You should take the battery out.”
“
I’ve got a better idea,” I say. I walk across the parking lot to a pickup that had been following us since Petaluma. The driver, a young man in a black t-shirt and jeans, is waiting at the register with his own nutritionally challenged dinner. The truck’s bed is loaded with boxes and camping supplies. I shove my cell phone between two of the boxes and walk back to the car.
“
Good thinking,” Tali says.
“
Thanks. I still think we’re fucked, but it’s worth a shot. We’ll have a better chance if we get off the highway. If they stop that guy, it’s not going to take them long to figure out they’ve been had. And if we’re three cars ahead of him …”
“
Got it. We’ll go east at our first opportunity. There’s a bunch of winding roads through the foothills. If we keep heading that direction we’ll eventually hit the interstate. It’ll be a hell of a drive, but they won’t be expecting it.”
“
And then what?”
She smiles.
“We’ll figure something out.”
Great.
We get back on the road and take the first exit off 101 leading east, wending our way into the foothills to the east of Santa Rosa. I find myself staring at Tali. I still don’t really understand why she is doing this. She’s a smart girl with a bright future. She hasn’t done anything illegal – not anything she could reasonably be prosecuted for, anyway. Why would she go out of her way to aid a fugitive wanted for mass murder? Is it just because that’s who she is? Is she driven to help other people even at the expense of her own life? Or am I not giving her enough credit? Is she actually choosing to help me of her own free will? I wonder what difference it really makes in the end.
“
I want you to know I’m sorry,” I say.
“
What for?”
“
For accusing you of not caring. About me, and about all those people. I know you were doing the best you could. It’s not your fault I fucked everything up.”
“
Paul,” she says, gently but sternly, “you didn’t fuck anything up. I meant it when I said the bomb wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known what Heller was up to. He was insane. I know that now. I guess I’ve known for a while.”
“
But if I hadn’t believed him, if I had just thought to …”
“
You weren’t thinking clearly. You were worried about me.”
“
Yes,” I say. “I was. But so was Heller. Heller thought he was saving your life by sending me there with a bomb.”
“
And he also knew he’d be killing lots of other people in the process. I’d rather not be saved, if that’s the price.”
“
But in Heller’s mind …”
“
Jesus, Paul. Get out of Heller’s mind, for God’s sake. I’m serious. The man was brilliant, but he was like … I don’t know, Icarus, flying too close to the sun. Or Medusa, turned to stone by her own reflection. I mean, we grab these names from Greek mythology, Ananke and Tyche, thinking we’re being so clever, like if we name something, we’ve figured it out. Like somehow we’ve managed to get the upper hand. But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that we’ve missed the point. Maybe the Greeks understood something that Heller and I didn’t. Have you ever noticed how many characters in Greek mythology think they have something figured out and then it bites them in the ass, precisely because they think they’ve figured it out? It’s called
hubris
. I mean, there’s Daedalus, who gets his ass trapped in his own labyrinth; Oedipus, who marries his own mother; Narcissus, who falls in love with his reflection … Narcissus is a great one, because it’s his own self-reflection that dooms him. Sound familiar?”
I
’m pretty sure she’s talking about Heller’s obsession with his own ideas of free will and determinism, but she could just as well be talking about me. Relentless introspection is what almost made me throw myself in front of a train. I guess I’m more like Medusa than Narcissus: I don’t like what I see.
“
Heller said that if you look too closely at free will, it disappears,” I say.
“
He’s right,” she says. “He should have listened to himself.”
We both laugh at that. One thing Heller didn
’t need to do was to spend more time listening to himself.
“
He should have found a hobby,” I muse. “Golf, maybe. Or fishing.”
“
I think you’re completely right about that,” says Tali. “Heller needed to get out of his head. Toward the end, he wasn’t the man I studied under at Stanford. He had changed into something else. A sort of mystic, almost.”
“
An oracle, maybe. Weren’t they all insane too?”
“
Yeah,” she says. “From the volcanic gases they inhaled. Foreknowledge drove them nuts. Appropriate. You know who one of the biggest heroes in Greek mythology is? Odysseus. The guy who tied himself to the mast of his ship so that he wouldn’t be tempted by the song of the Sirens. The Sirens were evil creatures who tried to lure passing ships into the rocks. Odysseus had his sailors plug their ears with beeswax. So he could hear the song, but wasn’t free to take any action, and the sailors were free to act but couldn’t hear the song. You can hear or you can act. But if you try to do both, you’re doomed. Heller didn’t possess the wisdom of Odysseus.”
I
’m thinking about Odysseus’ crew trying to clean the beeswax out of their ears when I fall asleep. I awake just before morning, as the last of a series of winding mountain roads spits us out into a suburb west of Sacramento. I ask Tali if she wants me to drive for a while. She’s reluctant, but I can see she’s exhausted. I finally convince her that she’s going to feel pretty dumb if her big escape plan ends with us crashing head-on into an eighteen wheeler.
We stop for gas, coffee and breakfast burritos.
Tali’s been paying for everything in cash; evidently she had been somewhat prepared to make a run for it. After discussing our options briefly, we decide to continue east to Interstate 5 and then head south toward Mexico. I don’t have my passport, but it’s not like it would do me any good anyway. I’ll have to hide in the trunk while Tali bats her eyelashes at the border guards. The eventual goal would be to get to a country with no extradition treaty with the U.S. – maybe the Cayman Islands. Tali seems to have looked into the matter somewhat. I defer to her expertise.
I get behind the wheel and start driving south.
Tali falls asleep and doesn’t wake up until Bakersfield. Soon we’re approaching the foreboding slope of highway north of Los Angeles known as the Grapevine. I ask Tali if she thinks Peregrine is finished.
“
Who knows,” she replies. “But Carlyle is dead, and even if the Tyche system survives the earthquake, they’ll never get anything useful out of it without me or Heller. Anyway, Peregrine is almost certainly going to go bankrupt trying to pay out all the claims in the Bay Area. And once it’s under bankruptcy protection, there’s no way it’s going to get away with trying to maintain an experimental program that’s never made them a dime. So Peregrine may survive in some form, but Tyche is done for. Ananke made sure of that. Nobody is going to trespass on her turf for a long time.”
“
So Ananke wins.”
“
Ananke is Ananke.”
“
What’s that supposed to mean?”
“
It means there’s no fighting Ananke. There never was any real chance we’d succeed. If you make life into a battle between free will and determinism, you’re going to lose. Conflict belongs to Ananke. The key is not to get into the fight in the first place.”
“
So you just give in to fate?”
“
No. You do your thing and let Ananke do her thing.”
“
And how do you do that, exactly?”
She looks over at me and smiles.
“I don’t have any fucking idea.”
After a moment, I say,
“I went to see your sister, Beth.”
“
You did? When?”
“
The day before the mall fiasco. I was trying to figure out what happened to you. Why you disappeared, I mean.”
“
How did she look?”
“
Peaceful. There was a rabbi there, named Freedman.”
“
That son of a bitch just won’t give up.”
“
He seemed like a nice guy.”
“
He is. But he’s also a son of a bitch.”
“
If you say so.”
“
I’m sorry, I shouldn’t talk about him like that. He means well. I just … All that religious crap, I don’t buy it. I guess it works for him, but it never did anything for me. I mean, where was God on the pier that day, when that girl got shot? And if I hadn’t been there, it would have been a whole lot worse. That wasn’t God that stopped that shooter, it was me.”
“
And Dave,” I say.
“
Who?”
“
The off-duty cop. His name is Dave.”
“
Yeah,” she says. “Me and Dave. We saved those people, not God. If God gave a shit, he wouldn’t have left the matter up to a coin toss.”
I don
’t have anything to say to that. I don’t know where God was, or is. Does Ananke work for God? Or do they share sovereignty over the universe? Maybe God is just Heller’s life force. Maybe we’re all little globs of God that were injected into embryos once upon a time, and now we’re stuck in a battle to the death with Ananke. A battle we’re going to lose.
Neither of us
mention it, but we know that Beth is dead. Probably Rabbi Freedman as well. I’m mostly glad about Beth; it isn’t right for someone to be suspended like that between life and death. I can only hope that she’s truly at rest somewhere. And hopefully her father is roasting in some special level of hell.
Oddly, I find myself profoundly saddened by the thought that Rabbi Freedman is gone. I barely knew the man. What was it about him? I
’ve never been a particularly religious guy, but somehow you have to admire a man that shows up at the bedside of a comatose girl to read psalms to her. I mean, talk about a job with no sense of gratification! Nobody even knew he was there. He had no way of even knowing whether she heard him or not. I guess that’s what people mean by faith. You show up and do your thankless job, not knowing if anybody knows or cares.
The thing is, though, it didn
’t seem like he thought of it as a thankless job. I think he actually liked sitting there with Beth, reading to her and praying over her. How do you explain that? Faith again, I suppose. Some people would say Freedman was deluded, wasting his time. I wonder, though. With all my running around the Bay Area, desperately trying to alter the outcome of events, what did I actually accomplish? I saved some lives in Alameda and I cost some in Hayward. And then I set off a bomb in the Fairway Mall. On balance, I’ve got a lot of red in my ledger.
And what about Tali?
She certainly meant well, but look at what she wrought with all her good intentions. The whole Bay Area is in ruins! Maybe that’s not entirely her fault, but Ananke was clearly reacting against the idea of the expansion of the Tyche program. If Tali hadn’t started tampering with events, maybe none of that would have happened. Jesus, am I really riding in a car with a woman who almost singlehandedly caused a catastrophic earthquake? And I’m relying on her to save me. What does that make me?
We stop for sandwiches in a suburb south of San Diego.
It’s our last stop before crossing the border. I wonder what our chances are of making it across. If the cops have figured out that Tali and I are together, they aren’t good. Otherwise we might actually make it. Even with recently tightened border security, they don’t search most cars heading from California to Mexico. But then what? It’s a long way to the Cayman Islands from Tijuana. I guess we’ll “figure something out.”
We sit on a picnic table behind the shop eating
our lunch. The place is pretty much deserted. It’s just after noon now, and the weather is surprisingly warm. You can’t beat southern California in February. Too bad we can’t stay.